“She loves singing [and] songwriting,” he says of her swirling around a pole atop an ice cream pushcart while she sang “Party in the USA.”

“I always tell her to love what you’re doing and stay focused for the love of the art and not worry so much about opinion,” Billy Ray Cyrus says, adding, “I give my kids a lot of freedom to make the art they want to make and make it in their own voice. I think it’s important.”

Yeah, let’s let a 16-year-old make her own mistakes, like taking risqué photos herself that circulate on the Web, posing topless in Vanity Fair (from the back) and hanging like a pole-dancer at the Teen Choice Awards.

It’s all part of growing up. Gotta let the young’uns learn the hard way, right?